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Self-hosting quickstart guide (5 min)

NetBird is open-source and can be self-hosted on your servers.

It relies on components developed by NetBird Authors Management Service, Management UI Dashboard, Signal Service, a 3rd party open-source STUN/TURN service Coturn, and an identity provider (available options will be listed later in this guide).

If you would like to learn more about the architecture please refer to the Architecture section.

It might be a good idea to try NetBird before self-hosting on your servers. We run NetBird in the cloud, and it will take a few clicks to get started with our managed version. Check it out!

Quick self-hosting with Zitadel IdP

In this guide, we will guide you through deploying NetBird with Zitadel as the identity provider for user management using a single-line setup script and docker containers.

This is the quickest way to try self-hosted NetBird. It should take around 5 minutes to get started if you already have a public domain and a VM. Follow the Advanced guide with a custom identity provider for installations with different IDPs.

Requirements

Infrastructure requirements:

  • A Linux VM with at least 1CPU and 2GB of memory.
  • The VM should be publicly accessible on TCP ports 80 and 443 and UDP ports: 3478, 49152-65535.
  • Public domain name pointing to the VM.

Software requirements:

  • Docker installed on the VM with the docker compose plugin (Docker installation guide) or docker with docker-compose in version 2 or higher.
  • jq installed. In most distributions Usually available in the official repositories and can be installed with sudo apt install jq or sudo yum install jq
  • curl installed. Usually available in the official repositories and can be installed with sudo apt install curl or sudo yum install curl

Download and run the script

Download and run the installation script in a single line:

export NETBIRD_DOMAIN=netbird.example.com; curl -fsSL https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/releases/latest/download/getting-started-with-zitadel.sh | bash

If you want to check the script before running it, you can download it and run it locally:

curl -sSLO https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/releases/latest/download/getting-started-with-zitadel.sh
# check the script
cat getting-started-with-zitadel.sh
# run the script
export NETBIRD_DOMAIN=netbird.example.com
bash getting-started-with-zitadel.sh

Replace netbird.example.com with your domain name.

Once the script execution is complete, you can access your netbird instance via the URL https://netbird.example.com using the credentials displayed in your terminal.

Creating users

If you want to add additional users, you can access Zitadel's management console via the URL https://netbird.example.com/ui/console with the same credentials. Follow the Users guide from Zitadel to add additional local users or integrate Zitadel with your existing identity provider by following the guide Configure identity providers.